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Paolo Palladino's avatar

Hi Derek, I enjoyed reading your post, so thank you for sharing. This said, in my view, every contextualisation provides a historical reason and rationale, tacitly or otherwise, so opening the space for the current accusation of justifying reprehensible actions. The best that one can then try to offer is a symmetric account. This, I think, is perhaps missing from your account, at least in the sense that the two narratives seem to me uneven. I don't gain as clear a sense of the Israeli perspective and how the events of October 7 come to be configured as the zero point. In other words, I think that the first part of your argument provides a powerful account of all that which gets forgotten with the refusal to contextualise. What I may have missed however is how the resetting of the clock was realised and credibly so. It took a few days for the setting of October 7 as hour zero to bed in and become generally accepted in large swathes of the world, and in a manner that foreclosed any appeal to historical context. I would be very interested in your thoughts on this.

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